What a woman wants

Max Lucado is one of my favorite writers; I have more than six of his books (the locally-reprinted editions which cost less than a hundred pesos each, not the originals which cost more than three hundred pesos each). I don’t remember from what book but Lucado said, “A man can spend a lifetime with a woman and yet never gaze into her soul”. Wow! This is the kind of writing and insight that makes women swoon and me to go and eat some pizza ...

Any man you talk to has, at various times in his life, thrown his hands up and shaken his head, wondering what the woman in his life really wants from him. As someone (Sigmund Freud? John Donne?) said, “Every woman is a science.” In the early 1970’s, I had a National Science Development Board scholarship in UP Diliman. I barely passed Math 17 and failed Physics 41, Math 53 and Engineering Science I. Hmm, this must be the reason I don’t understand women …

In the late 1990’s, I read through most of Dr. Larry Crabb’s books, namely, “Finding God”, “The Marriage Builder”, “Encouragement, The Key To Caring”, “Understanding People”, “Hope When You’re Hurting”, and “Men and Women, Enjoying the Difference”. Having come to know in recent years about nouthetic or Biblical counseling, I no longer agree with his “Christian psychology” viewpoints. Dr. Crabb, who visited the Philippines in 1994, is a great writer nevertheless. Posted below is an example of his excellent writing from the book “Men and Women, Enjoying the Difference”.

“A woman wants to know that the deepest parts of her being are richly enjoyed by a man who will therefore treat her with tenderness and look at her with delight, someone who will enjoy her because she is enjoyable, and not because of a manipulative desire that hopes to get from her what will bring pleasure to him.

“But women have learned to be skeptical. Every little girl has discovered that not everything wonderful about her will reliably be enjoyed. Some of who she is will at times be ignored, despised, demeaned or selfishly used. In a fallen world, she learns that offering all that she has to another runs the risk of rejection and abuse. And because she too is fallen and therefore committed to her own well-being with no thought of dependence upon God, she figures how to minimize the risks by hiding the tenderest parts of her soul and avoiding an honest look at her ugly parts.

“In order to survive in a world where people carelessly hurt her and use her for their own purposes, she learns to cover her delicate nature with a hard crust, a toughness that is always on alert for dangers. When she is by herself long enough to reflect on what she really wants, she becomes at least vaguely aware (sometimes acutely to the point of despair) of how nice it would be if someone were tough for her.

“Deep within her being, she longs for an advocate, not a tyrant who would control her life with strength, but an advocate whose strength on her behalf would free her to go off duty and to express more of who she really is. She longs for an advocate who would enjoy her and give her the hope that she could invite people into meaningful relationships with the confidence that there really was something about her that could be enjoyed.”